Re: jan gbnmvfx

Posted: Mon May 07, 2018 5:37 pm

by janKipo

Maybe ‘mi sona ala e nimi sina. ni li ike’. That is, it’s too bad you don’t understand my words, not that the words themselves are bad (what you said). But going back a page, I still don’t understand your first round of ‘nimi sina li ike e mi’. Nor the point of msot of the rest of what you said.

Re: jan gbnmvfx

Posted: Wed May 09, 2018 8:04 pm

by janKipo

Lope’s apostrophe, as I understand it, attached to ‘li’ indicates that the following word (the “verb”) is either a noun or an adjective, thus getting rid of the ‘ona li moku’ = "he eats” or “He is food” ambiguity. More profoundly it stands for an invisible copula (which tp neither has nor needs) that is inserted in the grammar before words used as nouns or adjectives in the “verb” (head of predicate) position. It’s a useful device for disambiguation (relative to English or German) but hard to justify in general -- even less than the commas before terminal prepositionsal phrases.

Re: jan gbnmvfx

Posted: Fri May 11, 2018 3:23 pm

by gbnmvfx

janKipo wrote:Lope’s apostrophe, as I understand it, attached to ‘li’ indicates that the following word (the “verb”) is either a noun or an adjective, thus getting rid of the ‘ona li moku’ = "he eats” or “He is food” ambiguity. More profoundly it stands for an invisible copula (which tp neither has nor needs) that is inserted in the grammar before words used as nouns or adjectives in the “verb” (head of predicate) position. It’s a useful device for disambiguation (relative to English or German) but hard to justify in general -- even less than the commas before terminal prepositionsal phrases.

gbnmvfx wrote:mi sona e ni: sina kepeken e nimi ' , tan seme?

I know this: Why do you use the word ' ?I know why you use the word '.

Re: jan gbnmvfx

Posted: Fri May 11, 2018 4:52 pm

by janKipo

Sorry, I was caught in a tp ambiguity, what the scope of a question is. ‘mi sona e ni: sina kepeken e nimi ‘, tan seme’ makes the whole complex sentence + display appear to be a question. It is an odd one, to be sure, since we don’t ordinary say we know something that we are questioning. But you might have been using ‘sona’ as a variant of ‘pilin’, say, and so a matter of “wonder”. I now realize that you were, in fact, trying to reproduce an English (or German, as far as I can recall -- it’s been 60 years) “indirect question” “I know why you use apostrophe”. This, of course, is not a question and. contains no question, merely a relative pronoun, which is externally identical to an interrogative one (and has been alas, for 5000 years). Translators (to languages which don’t have the same congenital disease) have learned to deal with this. So, what you meant was simply ‘mi sona e tan pi kepeken nimi ‘’ “I understand the reason for using apostrophe.” I confess I am not as thorough at cleaning up this particular mess as I should be, so too many cases of calquey passages have slipped through and I got caught by one of them. Sorry to have not caught it sooner and to have fed you a second dose of something that you already knew and, I hope, thoroughly disapprove.

I use the apostrophe to identify the missing verb in the sentence. As I have described in my lessons, this is an unofficial addition to better illustrate the grammatical context. If the apostrophe bothers you, just ignore it.

The standard for writing texts in toki pona is the Latin alphabet. There are several hieroglyphic systems for toki pona. You probably mean this system tomo-lipu.net

Other systems can be found at tokipona.net "Way To Write".

Unfortunately, this and other systems lack hieroglyphics for special characters. jan Makuwe's system contains special characters. That's why I described it in my lessons.

In my lessons I follow the lessons of B. J. Knight (2003, 2015) and the official Toki Pona book (first English edition 2014) by Sonja Lang. I have described my deviations from these lessons. For example, the additional apostrophe to identify a missing verb in the sentence and the additional comma to identify a subsequent preposition. I use these additions in my lessons to better illustrate the grammatical context. You can ignore them if you want.

Unfortunately there are some dialects, as B. J. Knight's lessons and especially Sonja Lang's book allow different interpretations of grammar.